


Files

by I_am_Best



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Experimental Style, Gen, Origin Story, Reaper Headcanons
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-14 17:29:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5751928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_am_Best/pseuds/I_am_Best
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even though their names are forgotten by the world, all reapers have their stories.</p>
<p>(Origin stories for a handful of reaper OCs that show up in other fics)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Rumours said she was chosen by God Himself to be a reaper, once the religions in this part of the world swung toward the Abrahamic. She didn't correct them, because it was somewhat true, but more importantly, it served her purposes. It made them fear her. She could work with fear. She had before.

When she'd died, there was no God, there were only gods. Fallible, fey, inhuman. But they did choose her because she dared challenge the natural order, who was at the mercy of whom. She saw far grander things than gods in starlight and dirt.

Those pathetic deities smote her down out of envy and fear. They killed her then cursed her with deathlessness to mock her, to make her like them. She had feared she was like them, at first, because what was man if not a mortal being? But she met others who'd fallen foul of their whims, and they were human still. _She_ was human still, in mind if not body, and she refused to be cowed. Death might have been beyond her reach now, but others would die, others did die. Good, bad, beautiful and ugly, people were truest to themselves in the moment of death and took that truth with them beyond the gates.

It frustrated her that she couldn't follow in this act that made humans so much _more_ than their gods, but she was resourceful. She began to collect those most intimate moments of humanity, just before they stepped across the threshold, dissected them and learned. They were attached to the evanescent concept of a soul, but souls were worthless without human thought to lend them value. She let the gods have those, but kept the memories for herself.

Time passed though it no longer mattered. She was unchanged, untouchable. Sometimes she found it hard to remember herself.

An angel came to her, clad in wheels and burning eyes. It told her she was commissioned by God to collect souls for judgement.

She had laughed at it. She knew of gods and cared not for their commissions. Let this one smite her again. It had worked so well the last time.

The angel told her it was her choice and left.

She tried to return to her studies, but the world had changed and she hadn't even noticed. This wasn't a god of her people, or the people who had come after and after and after. She had no sense of prophecy, but she saw the paths this God would take as surely as the roads humanity carved across the earth.

They made this God an Absolute, and other gods would fall before it. The One True God, they called it. A being wholly alien to her, a _thought_ wholly alien. Another would come in time to usurp the throne, but, for now, it was reshaping the world, and she noticed something new.

There were more like her appearing.

God was rewriting the rules of death.

She began to gather these wayward souls, learned their pasts, their reason for being there. She learned that God was petty as its predecessors, offering a gift nobody asked for and punishing those who threw it away. Yet some were pardoned by whatever arbitrary judgements it cast and offered passage into death. It stole what was mortal as its own divine right. That sickened her, but it was a power she could use. She would use. She deigned to play along.

She convened with others of the old guard, who themselves had met angels of this God and been given declarations. They made their own writs, their own decrees. Law was passed, a society built in tandem with but never touching humanity. The angel came again, or one like it, and gave them the code by which they would judge humanity.

Once their realm was established, once she saw it was good, she returned again to her work. There was a change in the wind as humans populated the realms of gods.

Ages passed, and still she stood while those old gods were forgotten.


	2. Chapter 2

She wasn't a witch, despite what they said. She just hated them, down to the last person. And she only even hated them because they called her a witch, and cut her snares, and stole her door, and it was the dead of winter and she was running low on food and cold and hungry and couldn't even cry because the tears would freeze to her cheeks (again).

She decided to see if she was a witch, though she didn't know what witches did exactly. As she snapped twigs to feed into her fire, she muttered some suitably witch-y sounding rhymes, hoping to conjure up some food to go along with her bitterness. If it worked, she'd move on to burning down the entire village. Little steps.

She waited. Snow blustered in under the blanket she'd strung up as a temporary door. Her fire flared, flickered, died at the onslaught.

It should have been easy, she thought as she tramped through the darkening woods. Everyone else did it, lived in the village, got married, had children. She shuddered, and it wasn't because of the cold icing through her threadbare layers. She didn't know why it  _wasn't_. Why she couldn't do that, when she couldn't do anything else, either.

She hated herself more than the villagers did. At least she couldn't feel the tears freezing to her skin, because her cheeks were already tingly and numb.

It was growing colder and colder, but she couldn't stand another night hungry, and it would be just as cold in her house.

There was a spot of wild carrots that she was sure only she knew about. Maybe there were a few stunted ones left after rooting animals and the frost got done with them. Her own garden had been lush and beautiful before winter and rotten children came through.

She knew how to survive. But what was the worth of just surviving, if it'd always be like this?

The deer surprised her almost as much as she'd surprised them. She hadn't been trying to be sneaky, but they shot out of the clearing and vanished like slivers of moonlight when she'd stumbled into view. The ground was turned up where they'd been digging, eating her damn carrots. She pawed through the frozen dirt for the maggot white hint of even just one remnant and came up with nothing. Her fingers were numb, her limbs weak and shaky.

She was going to starve to death. And she couldn't find the energy to care. Maybe the deer would come back for more carrots and find instead her carcass. Which they would eat, like the scavengers they were. They'd taken her carrots. She wouldn't give them another meal.

She resolved to die in her house instead of out in the forest, just to spite the animals that lived out here. Make them work for their food for once.

As she walked back, a dark shape on a sheet of ice that glowed in the night drew her attention. She resisted the urge to laugh when she realized it was one of the deer, stuck in the middle of the frozen lake. It was making a pathetic hissing noise, scrabbling for purchase on the slick, white surface. Small eddies of snow swirled across the surface around it.

She watched the deer struggle, a devious plan forming. It wouldn't be her carcass being eaten tonight. Somewhere in her layers she had a knife, and as soon as she found it she began inching across the ice toward the deer. It stilled as though sensing something was off, chest heaving, nostrils flaring.

Closer. Closer.

The sudden renewal of panic startled her, and she slipped on the ice. Her knife skittered away, metal singing as it dragged across the ice. The deer was tossing its head between her and something on the other shore.

She squinted in the dark, then cursed. What she took to be its family stood on the frost-tipped mud, and a small one that hadn't yet lost its spots was trying to step out onto the ice. She grabbed up some snow and compacted it into a ball, throwing it at the fawn. It spooked and they all bounced away, into the woods.

Her attention returned to the deer at hand, and she crawled for her knife. She returned and whispered that she'll try to make it painless, but sorry if she couldn't. Her arms were just so weak, you see, and there wasn't any leverage, and was that the same fawn back on the shoreline?

It bleated as it moved hesitantly toward the shoreline, which immediately roused the deer to escape again.

She said some very unkind things about the child this deer was raising and put her knife away. The deer's wet, dark eyes returned to her as she braced herself as best she could against the ice and shoved. It kicked. She shoved. To her surprise, they were inching toward the shore.

The echoing crack of ice drowned out her next curse.

* * *

Maybe she _was_ a witch. She didn't know how else to explain this turn of events.

Floating in the murky depths below her own two feet she saw...

Herself, she assumed.

She'd never actually seen more than watery reflections, and hadn't thought herself so gaunt, but the clothes were the same. She swam down and reached out to the hollow face, but couldn't bring herself to touch the flesh. Up close, she could make out the eye colour even in this gloom, a sort of stormy grey that might've been pretty if they weren't already turning milky in the icy water.

She amended witch to ghost, and wasn't terribly surprised. She'd not been very religious in life; it made sense nobody wanted her in death.

That didn't seem like too bad a thing so far.

The water should have been cold and thick as sap. It had been, as she fought and scrabbled, and faded. She couldn't recall what exactly happened between then and now, but now she moved easily through the water. Deciding there was naught to be done about the person who had her clothes and might've been her mere moments ago, she returned to the surface.

The deer's head snapped up, and it watched her heft herself out of the hole with a strength she hadn't felt in ages, if ever. The cold wasn't a problem, the hunger was gone, the weight of wet clothes felt like nothing.

She squinted at it then tried to rub away the blurriness around its figure.

"You get used to it," a person said behind her. She yelped, spun, nearly toppled if not for an arm around her waist. "And, if you manage to earn a job in management, you even get spectacles."

She found her footing and shoved the man away. A blur of brown hair, a pale circle of a face, dark clothes. Where had he even come from? "What are spectacles?" she asked instead. That wasn't what she'd meant to ask, but she refrained from hitting herself in company.

"Glass pieces for your eyes that make you see better."

"I used to see fine."

"And then you died."

She tried to string together what he and his talk of glass eyes and her dying had to do with one another. This strange, blurry man sounded smart, talked like he was smart, and left long pauses like he thought she was too and would fill in the blanks. There wasn't any connection she could discern though, so she moved on to more important matters.

"Can you help me move this deer?"

While she couldn't see his face beyond vague impressions and glowing eyes, she could feel his disapproval in the ensuing silence.

"Continuing," he said finally. "I am a reaper, and as I reaped you I am now also, and unfortunately, your mentor. You, lost soul, have thrown away the gift of life granted to you by God Himself. As punishment, you are destined to forever (or until a time otherwise determined by forces beyond our control or understanding and a review board) watch the lives of those more grateful souls who did not kill themselves and reflect on your misdeeds. What say you?"

"I didn't kill myself."

"Yes, you did. Or else we wouldn't be having this conversation."

Finding that to be a wholly lackluster argument and, therefore, proving her right, she turned on her heel to walk over to the deer. He sputtered an offended response, but soon the hollow sound of his steps thudded behind her. If he was going to accuse her of misdeeds she hadn't misdone, he could at least help her with her unfinished business on this mortal realm.

"Why are we helping this deer?" he asked as she directed him to push the hindquarters while she handled the head. The deer was silent, watching them with a curious placidity it had lacked when she'd been alive. Being dead, she wasn't much of a threat to it anymore.

"While deer are terrible, blighted creatures, barely good for food, I died for this carrot-thieving bastard. I _am_ going to get her to shore."

They slid the deer closer and closer to shore. Eventually, the man said, "You know this is why you're here, right? You threw away your life for a deer. All of your human possibilities, all of your days to come, thrown away for a dumb beast. Of all the stupid --"

"Shut up and push, please."

He sighed and did as ordered. "Will you talk to me afterward? Because I feel you've come to some grossly inaccurate conclusions already, and I can't in good consciousness leave you alone."

She paused, leaving the deer to spin and scrabble as the man missed the cue and pushed again, and thought the request over. She hadn't been very inquisitive in life, and she found herself less so now that the things she'd needed -- to not be hungry, to not be cold -- she had. What more in life was there than not starving, not freezing? Solitude, she supposed, but the man didn't seem like he'd be going away any time soon. All that was left was a void, a sort of strange unease that she couldn't quite recognize.

If she had no needs to fulfill, that left only desires to want. She'd never had such a luxury before. It... it was a little overwhelming to think about. Thinking never did her any good in life, so she stopped that right there. She would just let him tell her all those things she supposed she needed to know now.

"Yeah. I guess."


End file.
